Wall Street ends near flat, but financials climb with yields

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks ended little changed on Friday as financials rose with bond yields, while news that President Donald Trump instructed aides to proceed with tariffs on about $200 billion of Chinese products limited gains.

Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, U.S., September 7, 2018. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

The S&P financial index .SPSY was up 0.7 percent, leading percentage gains among sectors. Benchmark U.S. Treasury yields US10YT=RR rose above 3 percent earlier in the day but were last off those levels.

At the same time, the rate-sensitive S&P utilities index .SPLRCU fell 0.5 percent.

A source familiar with the White House decision also said the timing for activating the additional tariffs was unclear. The move came despite Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s attempts to restart talks with Beijing.

“There are a lot of headlines that have come out, people have been pretty active all week, and it’s Friday afternoon. You don’t really want to add additional risk when you don’t know what news might hit over the weekend,” said Michael O’Rourke, chief market strategist at JonesTrading in Greenwich, Connecticut.

For the week, the Dow was up 0.9 percent, the S&P 500 was up 1.2 percent and the Nasdaq rose 1.4 percent.

Also weighing on utilities was NiSource (NI.N), which tumbled 11.7 percent after fire investigators said they suspected a unit of the company, Columbia Gas, was linked to a series of gas explosions in Boston suburbs on Thursday.

Shares of insurer Travelers (TRV.N) were up 0.9 percent as analysts cut loss estimates from Hurricane Florence as the storm weakened.

Walmart (WMT.N) lost 0.6 percent after Goldman Sachs raised questions around the purchase of a majority stake in India’s Flipkart.

Adobe Systems (ADBE.O) rose 2.3 percent, a day after the company topped quarterly revenue and profit expectations.

Advancing issues outnumbered declining ones on the NYSE by a 1.04-to-1 ratio; on Nasdaq, a 1.12-to-1 ratio favoured advancers.

The S&P 500 posted 51 new 52-week highs and no new lows; the Nasdaq Composite recorded 118 new highs and 68 new lows.

About 6.2 billion shares changed hands on U.S. exchanges. That compares with the 6.1 billion daily average for the past 20 trading days, according to Thomson Reuters data.

Additional reporting by Shreyashi Sanyal in Bengaluru; Editing by Susan Thomas and James Dalgleish